Unit 10Critical theory is dead

Postmodernist thought

Peter Sloterdijk

Alas Dear Habermas (…) Critical theory is, on this Second of September, dead. She was long since bedridden, the sullen old

woman, now she has passed away completely. We will gather at the grave of an epoch, to take stock, but also to think of the end of

an hypocrisy. Thinking means thanking, said Heidegger. I say, rather, thinking means to heave a sigh of relief. (Die Zeit, 9

September 1999)

Modernity and grand-narratives

Modernism according to Gergen

• A revival of enlightenment beliefs• A search for fundamentals or essentials• A faith in progress and universal design• Absorption in the machine methapor

Grand-narratives

• Enlightenment• Humanism• Marxism• Capitalism• Psychoanalysis

Progress?

Are we all climbing the same mountain?

• Compare these grand-narratives to:• Popper• Kuhn• Feyerabend

• Nietzsche: Anti-foundationalism• Wittgenstein: Language-games

Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? (…)What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

Friedrich Nietzsche

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

The real and representation

• We cannot give a correct description of reality

Postmodernism

The ordinary

Jean-Francois Lyotard

• La Condition postmoderne, A Report on Knowledge

• Opposing universals, meta-narratives• Difference and micro-narratives, emphasizing

the local

Michel Foucault

• Historical research (remember Feyerabend)• Responsibility, sensitivity, justice, and law are

merely "tokens of ideology"

• Knowledge is always a form of power• Knowledge can even be gained from power,

power creates knowledge

Jacques Derrida and deconstruction

Research implications

• Against method• Avoiding a definitive viewpoint• Making research aware of ambiguity and

difference• Making research aware of the role of the

author

Criticism

Criticism

• Relativist• Vague, lost in its own complexity• Postmodernism is also a metanarative, relapse

into story-telling• Wolves in sheep clothes: conservatives

Sokal-affair

• Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

• 1. it contained the right buzzwords • 2. It flattered the editors' ideological

preconceptions.

Example

• Die Revolution der gebenden Hand (The revolution of the giving hand)

• The perversity of the welfarestate• Sloterdijk: revolutionary or disguised

conservative?